Monday. And the clock has turned forward one hour. It just seemed like a grand scheme to me, perpetrated by America to confuse the living daylights out of the Axis Powers! This article , though, says that Germany started it all, and going by the popular belief that Germany started everything evil in this world, that's a possible theory too. "Now the sun will rise one hour later", says the article. Are we megalomaniacs or what? We think that by turning forward our clocks, we make the sun rise later?
And the lament of time lost. Do we ever praise daylight saving because we gain the same time in October? We moan then that our sleep cycle is all screwed up! I think that we, as a nation, are a nation of moaners. Take the weather, for example. People who have lived here all their lives will still talk as if the snow is an entirely new concept to them. "More snow? When will it all end?" they groan. Every year is the worst, and that perfect weather that we dream of, probably occurs for one day a year. Come summer, and we are content( not happy, mind you) for a month at the most. Then come the groans about the heat. "It's so hot, we could fry an omlette on our doorstep." "It's so hot, the poor guy with glasses had his eyes burnt by the sun." We delight in such statements, and yearn for colder weather.

Fall is then as pretty as ever, but fall is too short most of the years. "Just 2 weeks was fall last year", I heard someone say," We didn't even have time to admire it." Now I may be a freak, but how long can you see pretty colors? For a week, really? It's all yellow and orange, nice, but then what? You can take the pictures of a lifetime in two weeks. But then, I am an apartment dweller, and we are a different species altogether.

But summer is a great thing. Like they say, you can never admire the Democrats unless the Republicans are in power once in a while. So, we have to take the bad weather as a Bush term.

To welcome summer, we went to the Reebok Outlet store on Sunday, where a friend had an employee discount of 40%. We go to the store, and see a buy two shoes, get one free sale that's going on. Each of us had to have at least two pairs, you could never beat this price! Between all of us, we had 6 pairs of shoes(some of us were a bit consevative), and assumed that we would have the 40% over the shoe sale. After an hour of figuring out what pair of pair of shoes need to be clubbed together to get a maximum discount(that is a major calculation, mind you, what with a shoe of $15 threatening to bring down our profits drastically), we finally figured it all out, and were at the counter.

These discounts are extremely mind boggling, and I propose a software that would automatically calculate the permutations and combinations, and would give us the cheapest price. As I write this, in fact, I am increasingly sure stores have that already, and we were just wasting all of that precious time trying to figure it out!

The sales clerk made the disclosure that we were being too greedy. We would get either the employee discount, or the offer. Now began another round of calculations. The poor sales clerk was looking at us, trying to get us to finish our complex problem, and as we were nearing a solution, I saw a woman holding a pair that looked so much superior to what I had picked up. I asked my friends to wait, but was rudely rejected. This interruption had caused them to miss their count, though, and they had to start all over again.

Finally, though, we went with the employee discount, and walked out of the store, happy that we had bought things we totally did not need for the cheapest possible price!